Author Archive for Janko Roettgers
By Janko Roettgers
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Tuesday, September 8, 2009 |
11:04 AM PT |
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OK, I admit it. I’ve become one of those snooty guys who is telling the rest of us what the future will look like. Case in point: I’m one of the authors of the “Internet Manifesto,” a collection of positions about the future of journalism that was published yesterday. The original manifesto was in German, collectively written by 15 journalists and bloggers more or less known in the German new media landscape, but it has since spread well beyond the krautosphere. Journalist Jeff Jarvis tweeted about it yesterday, an official English version was published earlier today, and users have contributed Finnish and Romanian translations.
The manifesto is a collection of 17 declarations about the future of media production online. At the core of the text is the claim that the Internet is a different medium with a disparate social and cultural impact than traditional mass media, and that publishers need to acknowledge these differences, rather than pretending they don’t exist or trying to make them go away. “Tradition is not a business model,” we wrote, arguing that we need new forms of journalism rather than regulations to protect the old. Fine by me, you might think, but why would anyone need a manifesto for that? Well, let me tell you why.
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By Janko Roettgers
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Monday, July 20, 2009 |
1:04 PM PT |
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By Janko Roettgers
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Wednesday, July 15, 2009 |
2:10 PM PT |
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It’s been a month since browser maker Opera announced Opera Unite to much fanfare, and it’s about time for a reality check: Its users have been struggling to access the browser’s new server functions in recent days, with file-sharing services unavailable and personal web pages returning server errors. At fault is Unite’s proxy architecture, which was supposed to make networking your browser easier, but has been unreliable at best. Add to this the fact that personal Unite pages have been showing up on Google, and you start to wonder what Opera really meant when it claimed to “reinvent the web” with Unite — start from scratch with a shaky architecture and unresolved privacy issues, just like in the early ’90s? Continue »
By Janko Roettgers
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Tuesday, June 16, 2009 |
8:47 AM PT |
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The German parliament is slated to vote on a bill this week aimed at cracking down on child pornography via the establishment of a mandated DNS block list. Representatives of the two parties that compose the country’s coalition government agreed on a final version of the bill late Monday night despite massive opposition from online activists and ISPs. Critics argue that DNS blocking is ineffective and fear the list could be the first step towards massive Internet censorship.
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By Janko Roettgers
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Tuesday, May 12, 2009 |
6:00 AM PT |
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Every family has someone who does all the tech support — you know, the guy who gets a call Friday night at 9 p.m. if Aunt Emma’s LCD picture frame doesn’t work. Chances are, if you read this blog, you are that person. Well, guess what: Your life is about to get even busier. San Francisco-based backup software startup Cucku wants you to safe-keep all of your family’s data.
Cucku has been offering a Skype-based buddy-to-buddy backup solution since late last year. The company is rolling out version 2.0 today, which includes multiperson support, as well as a neat sneakernet component as an answer to those slow upload rates we’ve been complaining about. Cucku is trying to establish itself in a crowded and increasingly brutal backup and storage solutions market, with companies like Crashplan and Zoogmo already offering buddy back-ups. But Cucku may be onto something with the idea of pairing up novices with more experienced users.
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By Janko Roettgers
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Thursday, March 12, 2009 |
4:00 PM PT |
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Tim O’Reilly had a simple message for the tech community earlier this week at the Emerging Technology conference: Support Obama! Wait, isn’t the campaign over? It may be, but the next presidential contest is already around the corner, and O’Reilly believes that there’s only a short window of opportunity to actually innovate in Washington. That’s why he wants to get tech folks involved now. I sat down with him yesterday to hear more about his plans to help the new administration.
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By Janko Roettgers
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Wednesday, March 11, 2009 |
5:30 PM PT |
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MIT researcher Nathan Eagle regaled the audience at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference yesterday with tales of technical innovation from East Africa. “Kenya has some mobile phone services that are years ahead of what we have right now,” he said. Eagle was at ETech to present his new startup, Txteagle, which aims to be a kind of mobile Mechanical Turk, using countless mobile phone users in Kenya and beyond to solve easy tasks and earn small amounts of money in return. (There’s a good writeup in Wired News today)
It’s definitely an interesting idea. But to me, the real story is how mobile phones have transformed a country like Kenya in recent years, making not only services like Txteagle possible, but also shaking up the region’s entire economic system. Continue »
By Janko Roettgers
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Monday, December 1, 2008 |
2:16 PM PT |
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The Internet is close to a meltdown, according to The Register. The culprit, according to author Richard Bennett, is the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent, which introduced a new type of file transfer with its most recent alpha version. BitTorrent clients have long been using the TCP protocol to facilitate file transfers, but now uTorrent is moving to UDP, a protocol that is very popular for streaming media, VoIP and other real-time transfers. This will essentially lead to torrents eating up all of the bandwidth available for VoIP, according to Bennett, who calls uTorrent’s UDP transfers a “net-killing feature.” Continue »
By Janko Roettgers
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Monday, October 20, 2008 |
5:06 PM PT |
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Brand Asset Digital launched its P2P advertising platform P2Pwords today, promising to bring pay-per-click advertising to file-sharing networks like Limewire, Gnutella and Emule. The NY-based company received a largely positive review from John Healey over at The LA Times Bitplayer blog, who thinks that “the opportunity presented by P2Pwords is so large, it may be hard for advertisers to resist.”
The combination of file sharing and advertising is definitely an interesting one. File-sharing networks attract millions of users. It’s becoming clearer every day that the entertainment industry’s shock-and-awe lawsuits just don’t work, which is why many look for other ways to monetize P2P. Still, it’s a good idea to approach these early trials with a healthy dose of skepticism. After all, Skyrider, another company that promised to marry search ads with P2P networks just closed its doors last week after burning through $25 million in funding. Continue »
By Janko Roettgers
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Wednesday, March 5, 2008 |
11:30 AM PT |
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Fire Eagle lead developer Tom Coates just announced at the ETech conference that Yahoo is launching Fire Eagle for developers today. Fire Eagle is meant to be a location broker that collects location information from a variety of services and devices and makes them available to other platforms. Fire Eagle offers open APIs both for data input and output, which means the service will coexist and possibly even enrich other location platforms. One of the first services plugging into Fire Eagle will be Dopplr.
The beta test is still invite-only, but you can sign up for one on the Fire Eagle web site. Coates said that 10,000 invitations were sent out today, and more will be available soon. Invited users also get a handful of invites to give away. Here are some screenshots:
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